What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring a website so AI answer engines — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot — can extract and cite it. AEO relies on crawlable server-rendered HTML, question-form headings, self-contained answer passages, consistent entity structured data and an llms.txt summary file.
Key facts
- •Answer engines cite passages, not pages
- •Server-rendered HTML is mandatory — most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript
- •Question-form H2s plus 40–70 word answers extract most reliably
- •One consistent Organization @id strengthens entity recognition
AEO vs SEO
SEO optimises for a ranked list of links; AEO optimises for being the quoted source inside a generated answer. The overlap is large — crawlability, authority and structured data serve both — but AEO adds passage-level formatting, entity consistency and machine-readable summaries such as llms.txt that classical SEO ignores.
The AEO checklist
Prerender or server-render every page, give each important question its own URL, answer within the first 60 words, add FAQPage or QAPage structured data that matches the visible text exactly, keep a single Organization entity across the site, publish llms.txt, allow GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, and cite primary sources so the page reads as verifiable.
Last reviewed 2026-09-03
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